Steve Clemons on Strategic Narcissism, American Leverage, and the Kind of Judgment Journalism Still Requires

For years, Steve Clemons has occupied a vantage point that is unusual in Washington: close enough to the foreign policy establishment to understand its language, rhythms, and habits of mind, but independent enough to notice when that conversation becomes self-reinforcing. In this conversation, he reflects on what he sees as the central blind spot of the American strategic class: a lingering assumption that the world still orbits around the United States in the way it once did.
The discussion ranges widely. Clemons traces the origins of his own career from an Air Force upbringing and early exposure to Cold War strategy, to writing on Japan and challenging Henry Kissinger as a student. He also reflects on what separates real judgment from the mere performance of seriousness, how he thinks about AI as a tool rather than an authority, and why young journalists should build expertise, live broadly, and learn to take editing well.
At its core, this is a conversation about leverage, perspective, and intellectual independence: how power looks from inside institutions, how it looks from outside them, and what it takes to think clearly when the official language of a profession starts to harden into mythology.

​—Steve Clemons is a longtime journalist, editor, and foreign policy commentator whose work focuses on politics, strategy, political economy, and the way institutions shape decision-making

The Gap Between Washington’s Worldview and the World Itself
Ben Wolf: You’ve spent years watching Washington from a vantage point that is slightly unusual, in that you’ve been very close to the foreign policy establishment and understand how it talks to itself, but independent enough to notice when that conversation becomes self-reinforcing. When you look at the national security class now, where do you think the greatest gap is between the way it describes the world and the way the world actually is?

Steve Clemons: That’s a great question. I think the strategic class in Washington is largely unconscious of how narcissistic it is. It is deeply self-absorbed. Over the last eighty years, America’s leadership and its role in building much of the world’s postwar institutional infrastructure placed the United States at the center of most major global action, or inaction. We were the nation that mattered. That mindset got baked into the way people here think.
So it is very hard for them to walk in other countries’ shoes. It is also hard for them to recognize that, over time, America’s significance, not that it has become insignificant, but its significance in all things, has diminished. The biggest gap today is that many people in Washington feel we are far more powerful and influential than we actually are. Other nations are making their own decisions and their own calculations. Not everything is built around the United States. In fact, we are at a moment marked by serious doubt about whether we will even remain present in many of the world’s problems.
The world has moved on in many ways. That does not mean we are unimportant. After Suez, the United Kingdom remained important, but it was no longer definitively important. I think that is the biggest gap right now. And I’ll tell you, some of the most powerful forces in foreign policy are psychological. You see it in countries like Russia. A great deal of what Putin does is bound up with a sense of humiliation at the hands of the West. In the United States, our version of that is an ego problem around diminished significance that we do not want to accept.

BW: Where do you think that gap comes from?

SC: I think the biggest reason the gap began to emerge is that many of the world’s major institutions, the UN, the WTO, and others, came to represent less and less of how power was actually distributed. Where does India fit in? Where does Brazil fit in? Where does a country like Iran fit in? It has ninety-two million people and is certainly not on our list of favorite nations, but it still carries weight. How does China fit in? China is in the UN, of course, but in many institutions it had to muscle its way in, and that has often been an uncomfortable arrangement.
A lot of these institutions have not adapted well to how power is now distributed. In my view, and I do not blame him entirely, but President Obama had a unique chance after George W. Bush to rewire some of those institutions and make them more reflective of the world as it had become. He had the opportunity, as a transformational president, to help write a new global social contract for the United States and to help create institutions that better matched the real structure of global power. He failed to do that.
So the gap you are talking about comes from this growing distance between the world America wants to see and the world as it actually is, combined with our failure to modernize. We were still sitting atop institutions we built eighty years ago, and we have been inconsistent in figuring out how to keep evolving them. That is why, on the one hand, America can look more muscular than ever. We throw power around constantly. But in terms of alliances, trust, and solving global problems, we are simultaneously more forceful and yet weaker, less able to get the outcomes we want.


How His Career Began
BW: I want to go back to the beginning of your career. What first got you involved in foreign policy and domestic politics journalism? Was it a specific moment, or did it develop subtly over time?

SC: I was an Air Force brat. I grew up in the military. My dad was in the Air Force, and we lived all over the world. I graduated from high school in Japan. At the time, we were in the middle of the Cold War, and my dad, like everyone else in that world, was very focused on what they saw as Soviet competition with the United States. It was the Soviet Union then, not Russia.
So I grew up in that environment. I always thought of myself as someone who had a lot of international experience as a kid, and I was interested in political science and economics. It seemed natural to focus on those things. When I was at UCLA, I got involved with something called the Center for International and Strategic Affairs. It has a different name now. I also worked with the RAND-UCLA Center for the Study of Soviet International Behavior. It had a very long acronym.
I worked there for a man named Arnold Horelick, who had been the top Soviet intelligence officer on the National Intelligence Council during Jimmy Carter’s presidency. He had written a classified study of the Cuban Missile Crisis. He completely intrigued me. He was our top Soviet expert. Brilliant. Graham Allison’s Essence of Decision, which in political science was one of the books you always read, was based in part on Arnold’s work.
So I entered that world in the early 1980s, and you could already feel the Soviet Union slipping. You could feel the decline. We held a conference at UCLA in 1984 that brought together many of America’s best-known Soviet experts, and you could sense, in the discussion, the breakdown that would later become unmistakable in 1989. We all saw the foreshocks. For a young person, it was extraordinary to be in the middle of that. I was just a kid, but I was around people who mattered intellectually. They were driven by ideas. These were not just people with titles. They knew things. They cared deeply. They debated seriously. I got hooked.
At the same time that the Soviet Union seemed to be declining, the region I knew best, Japan, was rising. So I shifted from being a Soviet watcher to someone who thought, maybe I should return to my own roots and study Japanese politics, the Japanese economy, and Japan’s place in the world. It is hard for younger people to fully appreciate now, but Japan was once what China is today in the American imagination. It was an ally, but it was also seen as a serious threat to American economic dominance.
That whole period fascinated me. I thought Japan represented a genuine competitive challenge, but also a different way of organizing national strength. It took elite graduates, put them into powerful positions across industry and government, and there was a kind of coordination there that was deeply interesting. The American model was much more laissez-faire and chaotic. You can argue that the United States is ultimately more inventive and creative, but there are moments when another organizational model can be highly competitive.
So I got caught up in the world of ideas, frameworks, ways of thinking. That is really where it began.


Writing, Publishing, and Kissinger
SC: The journalistic side came from the fact that I just started writing. In college, I was involved in something called the UCLA Undergraduate Review. I was in the honors college. I wrote constantly, and then I started trying to get my work published.
The first thing I published outside college was a letter to the Los Angeles Times challenging Henry Kissinger. He had written an op-ed about Japan, and without getting too deep into it, he was wrong about some structural features of Japan’s political system and how they were shaping the trade disputes we were having at the time. So I was cocky. I wrote a response.
Because I worked for Arnold Horelick, I had access to Kissinger’s address in Arnold’s Rolodex. After my letter was published, I mailed it to Kissinger. I wrote, “Dear Dr. Kissinger, I thought I would share this with you. With all due respect, I saw things somewhat differently and thought you might find it interesting.” Very polite.
Then I got a note back from Henry Kissinger. It was extraordinary to me. He thanked me for the piece, and at the bottom, in his own handwriting, he had scrawled a question: “Well, how do you lobby Japan at the subcabinet level?” To anyone else it would have seemed minor, but to me it was electrifying. I had just had my first interaction with Henry Kissinger, and it was clearly his handwriting. So I ended up writing a paper on the question he had posed, and the whole experience was thrilling.
Then, many years later, when I was running the Japan America Society of Southern California, the Soviet Union had collapsed and Japan was still rising. I organized a conference on what would drive power in the post-Cold War world: the size of your military or the size of your economy. Kissinger was famously associated with the first view; I was interested in the second.
Kissinger was on the board of ARCO at the time, and I knew the company’s CEO. I was still a relatively young guy running the Japan America Society, and I said, “Kissinger’s fee is fifty thousand dollars. Is there any way you can tell him I’m the young man who once wrote to him?” I showed him the exchange. And not only did Kissinger agree to speak without his fee, but the CEO flew him out on an ARCO plane.
That conference became huge. It started with Kissinger, then included Larry Eagleburger, Brent Scowcroft, Pete Wilson, and eventually even Richard Nixon. I had Democrats there as well. It became this major event, and somehow it all traced back to a college-aged exchange of letters. That is when I really got addicted to this world.


AI, Journalism, and Staying Useful
BW: Today, with AI, the 24-hour news cycle, and everyone having much shorter attention spans, do you think aspiring journalists need to think differently about the field than you did when you were coming up?

SC: That is a good question. I do not know that I have thought deeply enough about all the displacement dimensions of AI and journalism, except to say that AI is going to write a lot more journalism. I worry that we are entering a world where we will constantly ask whether something nuanced, subtle, and context-rich was written by a human or generated by a machine. And increasingly, the answer may not be obvious.
A lot of people say the key is to use AI as a tool, and I think there is truth to that. Use it on top of your own inquiry. Use it in support of your own reporting, your own accountability, your own thinking. The truth is, some of the best journalists I know will be able to do that. They will use AI well and still stand above it. But not everyone is at that level. A lot of journalists are just trying to do solid work and get by.
I have long told people who want to become journalists: go live life first. Go do something interesting. Go learn a topic deeply. Then become a journalist. I never studied journalism, and I have nothing against people who do. They learn a useful craft. But I think the way to remain ahead is to know something so well, and so deeply, that you become indispensable to that subject. Then you learn to write and report on it well.
We still do not know exactly how AI will play out, but I do think it will displace a lot of people, not just in journalism, but in many white-collar professions. We are going to have to see where it goes.

BW: How have you been using AI in your own daily life?

SC: For me, AI is like a very fast version of the reference tools people used to keep on shelves. Your grandparents had Encyclopaedia Britannica, Webster’s Dictionary, Roget’s Thesaurus. Then all of that moved online. Now, with AI, you not only have access to information, you also have something helping organize it.
So I use it as an adjunct. I do a lot of public speaking, a lot of research, a lot of problem-solving. I use Claude, Gemini, and ChatGPT for different things. I will ask for perspectives because it sometimes surfaces angles I had not considered. That does not mean it is always right, but it can make me think, “That’s interesting. I had not considered that frame.”
I never use it to generate my product, my writing, or my opinions. It helps me work. It also helps with quick primers. I know a lot about Japanese history, a little about Russian history, and almost nothing about Turkish history. AI can give you an opening orientation very quickly.
At the same time, I see a lot of bias in these systems. A friend of mine wrote a book about Thomas Willing, an important founding-era banker, the first president of the Bank of North America and the first president of the Bank of the United States. He was central in ways most people do not appreciate, and yet when you ask many platforms about him, he is described as a kind of second-tier figure. That tells you something important. These systems aggregate inherited judgments. If history overlooked you, the platforms often will too.
So when you look things up, you are often receiving accumulated bias, not settled truth. If that can happen to someone like Thomas Willing, imagine how much worse it is for people who were even more marginalized in the historical record. So yes, I use AI as an adjunct, but I am also constantly wrestling with how wrong it can be.


Judgment Versus the Language of Seriousness
BW: You spend a lot of time talking to people who know how to sound authoritative. What separates someone who actually has judgment from someone who just knows the language of seriousness?

SC: I think you can tell fairly quickly whether someone has a real command of historical context. You can usually tell whether they are genuinely well read and deeply informed, and whether they can draw on that grounding to explain their views or their decisions. To me, that is one marker of serious judgment.
By contrast, there are people who may perform the role well, but you get the sense they are basically reading talking points. They are not grounded in their own learning or their own critical thinking. The differences can be subtle, but they are real.
That does not mean you should become closed off. I always tell people to maintain a wide aperture. Look broadly. Listen. Do not become so self-confident that you stop taking in information. But there is a difference between someone who has thought deeply and someone who is just playing a part.
I saw this all the time on television. I was an MSNBC contributor for about eight years, and you could tell who had genuinely thought about an issue and who was essentially recycling a script. You would hear the same talking points repeated from show to show to show. They were clearly just circulating a line. I never wanted to do that, and the people I respected most did not do it either.


American Leverage and the View from Outside Washington
BW: You’ve also spent time talking to people outside the American establishment, people less invested in Washington’s own mythology. Has that changed the way you think about American leverage, and how much of it is real versus assumed?

SC: Yes, absolutely. And I have felt that gap for a long time. The distance between the confidence with which many Americans think they are exercising leverage and the reality of how much leverage they actually have has been growing for years.
I once wrote that you can measure the contraction of American power not only through enemies rising, but through allies hedging their bets. I looked at Japan and Germany, countries we defeated in World War II and then helped rebuild, and also at Israel and Saudi Arabia, both deeply tied to the American security framework. You could see all four doing things that, ten years earlier, they would never have done. They were hedging against the possibility that America might not be there for them in the way it once was.
That was long before Donald Trump. Long before the current moment, you could feel relationships becoming more conditional. There is always a lot of triumphal rhetoric in Washington about how close allies are and how durable those bonds are. But over time, the love became less unconditional.
I also worked closely with Chalmers Johnson, a fascinating intellectual. We founded the Japan Policy Research Institute together. He wrote Blowback, which became one of the most sought-after books after 9/11 because people were suddenly asking whether aspects of America’s posture in the world had contributed to the terrorism that struck us. Chalmers later became more radical than I was comfortable with. In books like Nemesis, he came to see America itself as a rogue power. I did not go that far, but I found parts of his argument deeply instructive.
The broader point is that as India rose, as China rose, as interdependence deepened, it became harder and harder to sustain the fiction that America controlled everything. We were living in a world of interdependence, and a world of interdependence is not a world of total American control. That has been clear to me for a long time.
And yes, engaging people outside the American establishment reinforced that view. H. R. McMaster has called this “strategic narcissism,” and I think he is right. We are so caught up in ourselves that we miss the extent to which much of the world is moving to a different drummer.


Advice to Students Entering the Field
BW: As we begin to close, I want to turn the conversation directly back to students. When you think about your own early career, what skills were most valuable in setting you apart, and what should young journalists today aspire to develop?

SC: I always want to be careful about generalizing, because everyone’s path is different. In my case, my dad died on my first day of college. I was American, but I had really come from Japan into UCLA, and suddenly I had to work immediately to stay in school.
One of the things I did was work with faculty members on their research projects. I supported work in sociology, econometrics, and other fields. I learned a tremendous amount as an undergraduate because I had to. Some students were more passive. I was not doing it out of some grand plan. I was trying to survive and make money. But it forced me into a much wider intellectual life than I otherwise might have had.
So one lesson is that breadth matters. Diverse experiences matter. They can differentiate you. Another is that relationships matter very early. I built strong relationships with professors, and those professors trusted me. That is how I became involved with the Center for International and Strategic Affairs and with RAND-UCLA. I remember reading Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon, which is about the early strategic thinkers in American nuclear policy, and realizing that I actually knew many of the people in it. I was nineteen or twenty years old.
That taught me that people matter. The people you meet along the way matter. When you are young, you do not always understand that yet. For me, that meant saving business cards and building a Rolodex. Today, it would mean maintaining your contact database. In Japan, the exchange of business cards and the cultivation of relationships are taken very seriously. In the United States, we are often much worse at that. But for journalists, future sources matter, and relationships matter.
Second, live life. Go do different things. Do not just copy what everyone else is doing. The more varied and interesting your experiences are, the more you distinguish yourself in a crowded field.
Third, do not hate editing. Let people edit you. I have to be edited. Everyone has to be edited. One of the clearest indicators of who will grow as a writer is whether they can accept constructive criticism about how they communicate. Be open to that.


What to Read
BW: Finally, as is customary with the Pathway Blog, if there were a young student interested in following a career path similar to yours, what piece of literature would you recommend to them, and why?
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SC: That is a tough question. I read ravenously. There is a book that probably is not easy to find now, but it really affected me when I was young: If You Meet the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him. It is basically a reminder not to over-revere your idols. You can admire people, certainly, but do not surrender your own judgment. It is really about developing confidence in your own thinking.
I think a lot of young people should absolutely be inspired by great figures, but not intimidated by them. More generally, I am obsessed with the founding era of the United States. I find it fascinating how many times this country almost did not happen. That period is full of struggle, contingency, and improvisation, and I find that incredibly compelling.
There is also a wonderful book on Cicero that I love: Cicero: The Life and Times of Rome’s Greatest Politician by Anthony Everitt. It is such an interesting portrait because Cicero could be slippery, opportunistic, even exasperating, but underneath all that he developed ideas that proved durable for thousands of years. I find that very compelling too.